This is a translation of an article written by Spaniard author Arturo Pérez-Reverte in 1998, published in “El Semanal” under the title “Los Amos del Mundo”. Ten years later, it looks like he was right on the money. Full credit, of course, goes to him.
The Lords of the World.
You don’t know it, but you depend on them. You neither know them, nor will cross their paths in your whole life, but those great sons of bitches have in their hands, in their handhelds, in the Intro key of their keyboards, your future and that of your children. You don’t know what their faces look like, but they’re the ones who’ll send you to the unemployment line in the name of a three point seven, or a probability index of zero point zero-four.
You have nothing to do with those Does because you’re a shop attendant in a hardware store, or a cashier in the supermarket, and they studied in Harvard and did a Masters in Tokyo – or the other way around -, every morning they go to the stock exchange in Madrid or Wall Street, and say things in English like long-term capital management*, and talk about high risk investment funds, of multilateral investment agreements and of savage economic neoliberalism, as if they were talking about the Sunday game.
You haven’t even seen a painting of them, but those suicide drivers who ride a van full of money at two hundred miles an hour will run over you any day now, and you won’t even have the consolation of going after them on your wheelchair with a shotgun to blow their balls off, because they have no public face, despite being such reputed analysts, finance sharks, prestigious experts on other people’s money. Such expertise they have that they always manage making that money their own; because they are the ones who always win, when they win, and they’re the ones who never lose, when they lose.
They don’t create riches, they merely speculate. They open to the world fatuous combinations of financial economy which had nothing to do with productive economy. They raise houses of cards which they guarantee with smoke and mirrors, and all the powerful men in the world crap themselves just looking at them to butter them up and get on the train.
This can’t fail, they say. Here, no one will lose; risk is minimal. Great Nobel Prize winners in Economy, prestigious financial reporters, international groups with cool acronyms of renowned prestige all support us. So the president of the transeuropean whatever bank, and the president of the Helvetian union of banks, and the fat cat of the latin-american bank, and the euroasiatic consortium, and the mother that gave birth to the lot of them, happily hop aboard for the adventure, bring in money by the truckload, and then they sit to wait for the buff that will make them even more filthy rich, them and all those they represent.
And as soon as the first thing goes right they go and risk more for the second, because hey, it’s a deal so good it’s almost a steal, and a zillion-percent interest rate can’t be found every day.
And while this mirage of speculation has nothing to do with the real economy, with the everyday life of the people on the streets, it’s all euphoria, and pats on the back, and even official banks risk their currency reserves. And, ladies and gentlemen, this is a bed of roses.
And all of a sudden it turns out that no. All of a sudden the invention has some failings, and the high risk thing wasn’t just a phrase but it meant exactly what it said: real, true high risk. And at that point the whole marquee comes down crashing. And those special funds, dangerous, which have an increasingly important role in the world economy, show their dark side. And then – wonder of wonders! – while the benefits were for the sharks who ruled the roost and for those who risked other people’s money, turns out that the losses are not.
The losses, the financial bite, the payment for those poshland rich kids who play with the world economy as if it were a game of Monopoly, land squarely on the backs of all of us. Then it turns out that, while the benefits were private, the errors are of all of us and the losses must be socialized, coming to the rescue with emergency measures and lifesaving funds to avoid domino effects and their goddamn mothers.
And that solidarity, mandatory if we want to save the world economy, is paid with their skin, with their savings, and sometimes with their jobs, by John A. Smith, an employee at a chain store, and the millions of unhappy Johns that, all through the world, wake up at six in the morning every day to earn a living.
That’s what’s coming, I’m afraid. No one will forgive a single cent of the debt owed by the third world countries, but there will never be a lack of funds to cover holes left by speculators and swine that play Russian roulette on other people’s heads.
So we better start holding onto our hats. That is the landscape the Lords of the World have prepared for us, with the fairy tale of all that economic neoliberalism and all that shit, of so much speculation and so little shame.
Translation ends.
* In English in the original publication.
The text has been circulating around and spread far and wide in the spanish-speaking web. A sample link to the original sotry:
http://alicanteconfidencial.blogspot.com/2008/11/los-amos-del-mundo-arturo-prez-reverte.html
If there’s something you can count on is for Arturo to call a spade a spade and don’t mince words when things matter.